“Please,” said Madame Morrible to the sisters, with a sour glance at Nanny, “I haven’t asked you here so that your Nanny could discuss this contemporary apocrypha, nor to slander our glorious Wizard. It was a peaceful transition of power. That the Ozma Regent’s health failed while under house arrest was a mere coincidence, nothing more. As to the power of your father to raise the missing royal child from some unsubstantiated state of somnolence—well, you’ve as much as admitted to me that your father is erratic, if not mad. I can only wish him health in his endeavors. But I feel it my duty to point out to you girls that we do not smile on seditious attitudes at Crage Hall. I hope you have not imported your father’s royalist yearnings into the dormitories here.”
“We assign ourselves to the Unnamed God, not to the Wizard nor to any possible remnant of the Royal Family,” Nessarose said proudly.
“I have no feeling on the matter at all,” muttered Elphaba, “except that Father loves lost causes.”
“Very well,” said the Head. “As it should be. Now I have had a package for you.” She handed it to Elphaba, but added, “It is for Nessarose, I think.”
“Open it, Elphie, please,” said Nessarose. Nanny leaned forward to look.
Elphaba undid the cord and opened the wooden box. From a pile of ash shavings she withdrew a shoe, and then another. Were they silver?—or blue?—or now red?—lacquered with a candy shell brilliance of polish? It was hard to tell and it didn’t matter; the effect was dazzling. Even Madame Morrible gasped at their splendor. The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.
“He writes that he bought them for you from some toothless tinker woman outside Ovvels,” said Madame Morrible, “and that he dressed them up with silver glass beads that he made himself—that someone had taught him to make?—”
“Turtle Heart,” said Nanny darkly.
“—and”— Madame Morrible flipped the letter over, squinting—“he says he had hoped to give you something special before you left for university, but in the sudden circumstances of Ama Clutch’s sickness . . . blah blah . . . he was unprepared. So now he sends them to his Nessarose to keep her beautiful feet warm and dry and beautiful, and he sends them with his love.”
Elphaba drove her fingers through the curlicues of shavings. There was nothing else in the box, nothing for her.
“Aren’t they gorgeous!” Nessarose exclaimed. “Elphie, fix them on my feet, would you please? Oh, how they sparkle!”
Elphaba went on her knees before her sister. Nessarose sat as regal as any Ozma, spine erect and face glowing. Elphaba lifted her sister’s feet and slipped off the common house slippers, and replaced them with the dazzling shoes.
“How thoughtful he is!” said Nessarose.
“Good thing you can stand on your own two feet, you,” muttered Nanny to Elphaba, and put her old hand patronizingly on Elphaba’s shoulder blades, but Elphaba shrugged it away.
“They’re just gorgeous,” said Elphaba thickly. “Nessarose, they’re made for you. They fit like a dream.”
“Oh, Elphie, don’t be cross,” Nessarose said, looking down at her feet. “Don’t ruin my small happiness with resentment, will you? He knows you don’t need this kind of thing . . .”
“Of course not,” said Elphaba. “Of course I don’t.”
That evening the friends risked breaking curfew by ordering another bottle of wine. Nanny tutted and fretted, but as she kept downing her portion as neatly as anyone else, she was overruled. Fiyero told the story of how he had been married at the age of seven to a girl from a neighboring tribe. They all gawped at his apparent lack of shame. He had only seen his bride once, by accident, when they were both about nine. “I won’t really take up with her until we are twenty, and I’m now only eighteen,” he added. With the relief of imagining he might still be as virginal as the rest of them, they ordered yet another bottle of wine.
The candles guttered, a small autumnal rain fell. Though the room was dry, Elphaba drew her cloak about her as if anticipating the walk home. She had gotten over the sting of being overlooked by Frex. She and Nessarose began to tell funny stories about their father, as if to prove to themselves and to everyone else that nothing was amiss. Nessarose, who wasn’t much of a drinker, allowed herself to laugh. “Despite my appearance, or maybe because of it, he always called me his beautiful pet,” she said, alluding to her lack of arms for the first time in public. “He would say, ‘Come here, my pet, and let me give you a piece of apple.’ And I would walk over as best I could, tilting and tottering if Nanny or Elphie or Mother wasn’t around to support me, and fall into his lap, and lean up smiling, and he’d drop small pieces of fruit into my mouth.”
“What did he call you, Elphie?” asked Glinda.
“He called her Fabala,” interrupted Nessarose.
“At home, at home only,” Elphaba said.
“True, you are your father’s little Fabala,” crooned Nanny, almost to herself, just outside the circle of smiling faces. “Little Fabala, little Elphaba, little Elphie.”
“He never called me pet,”’ said Elphaba, raising her glass to her sister. “But we all know he told the truth, as Nessarose is the pet in the family. Hence those splendid shoes.”
Nessarose blushed and accepted a toast. “Ah, but while I had his attention because of my condition, you captured his heart when you sang,” she said.
“Captured his heart? Hah. You mean I performed a necessary function.”
But the others said to Elphaba, “Oh, do you sing? Well then! Sing, sing, you must! Another bottle, another glass, push back the chair, and before we leave for the night, you must sing! Go on!”
“Only if the others will,” said Elphaba, bossily. “Boq? Some Munchkinlander spinniel? Avaric, a Gillikinese ballad? Glinda? Nanny, a lullaby?”
“We know a dirty round, we’ll go next if you go,” said Crope and Tibbett.
“And I will sing a Vinkus hunting chant,” said Fiyero. Everyone chortled with pleasure and clapped him on the back. So then Elphaba had to stand, push her chair aside, clear her
